I've had 2 6950's which were exhibiting the same behaviour but i thought as AMD are writing newer drivers to support the newer GCN core of the 7 series that this problem would go away.So i purchased 2 XFX Black edition 7970's,Ohhh the FPS spikes in games has come back to haunt me.Every single latest game i've tried,Crysis 3,Far cry 3,Tombraider,Hitman absolution,Sleeping dogs are all dropping fps at random,I've heard about crossfire being even worse but i've tried 1 card only as well and the issue is still there just not as bad,for eg crysis 3,i can be getting way over 100fps then all of a sudden it will drop to under 60fps stutter like hell then recover to it's normal power output,tombraider was butter smooth till i got to the mountain area camp and now it's dropped to 45fps and as this is happening i can see the gpu usage drop as well.I've been with AMD for the last 2 series of cards but am left feeling annoyed i've spent over £600.00 for 2 top end cards that can't deliver smooth fps output,tried with the last 3 sets of beta drivers,FPS have increased but it's no good when the latency spikes are still there AMD.I think these will be my last AMD gpu's.

Personal experience has shown that Nvidias are for a dumb jock, they pretty much run out of the box without major issues, you pay more, hope you don't get drivers that fry the gpu's (I will never forget these drivers), while with AMD you can save money, get equal or even better performance and all you need to do is use your brain to tinker with the settings, make sure you clean install the drivers, in case of crossfire run CAP, make sure they get enough stable power by not using a cheap chinese power supply etc etc.

Yeah i know what you mean about nvidi'a drivers frying cards,well they used to but in all honesty no amount of tinkering is going to fix frame lag spikes with the current ati drivers,it completletely makes games that are running in excess of 100 fps and some to a jerky ridden mess,it's not what you expect from 2 7970 gpu's.by the time this is sorted out with drivers these cards value would have dropped like a stone hence why i'm debating to return them,only had them a week.

If a game doesn't have a consistent frame rate, blame the developer, not the graphics driver.

Virtually no modern game will have the same frame rate from one scene to the next. If you want consistency, the best you can do is vsync, which has other benefits as well (no screen tearing, less power usage and heat generation).

The same is true with nVidia hardware, which certainly does not run out of the box with no major issues for everyone.

Finally,the 45fps with Tomb Raider is entirely a CPU bottleneck. Lower your "Level of Detail" settings to reduce the impact, or just live with it.

@robkarp i'm glad your not have these issues,are you single card or crossfire ? although i haven't tried the beta 5's.@Thanny i very highly doubt tombraider is a cpu issue lol,if an i7 3770K @ 4.1 is a bottle nect for tombraider i'm a chinaman and i don't want to go into too much detail but here you go http://megagames.com/news/radeon-hd-cards-suffer-spikey-frame-latency it's a well known problem with AMD's drivers,it's nothing to do with the developers if FPS drop and then at that specific moment in time GPU usage drops that's why the games stutter,it's the drivers and AMD know about it.

http://techreport.com/news/24136/driver-software-to-be-tweaked-to-reduce-radeon-frame-latencies-in-series-of-updates AMD even know about it,it's these latency spikes which cause multi gpu setups to go out of sync with each other,it does happen in single configuration as well just not as bad.can't believe it's taking them nearly 1 year to notice the issue.

There are latency issues in some games, which is supposed to be addressed in the 13.2 betas and beyond. But that's not what's happening to you.

Frame latencies would not manifest as a big drop in frame rate. It would look like persistent stuttering. If you're going from 100fps when looking in one direction to 60fps when looking in another, that's just a difference in rendering load caused by the game. With high frame latency, the reported frame rate would be the same, but things would not look smooth.

And the issue with Tomb Raider is unquestionably a CPU bottleneck. See here for a thorough discussion of the issue. Your 4.1GHz processor would also be a severe bottleneck in the game Assassin's Creed III.

Adrian... dude... it's no wonder your confused here. Your mixing together multiple different issues that are all mostly unrelated.

The story you linked from TR is an issue of latency in the rendering pipeline created by the driver. As Thanny already explained, it's not going to be the cause of a sudden, huge drop in frame rates. The whole point of the story is that measuring frame rates may not uncover a latency problem such as this one in the first place.

The CPU bottleneck created by Tomb Raider is another. This is unrelated to the issue with the drivers. There will still be a CPU bottleneck in Tomb Raider(and others) even after the drivers are fixed.

Micro-stuttering caused by multiple GPUs falling out of sync is another. It's unrelated to both the driver issue, and the CPU bottleneck in Tomb Raider. Even if there was something very wrong in how your system is configured(like mixing an x16 with an x4 slot, for example) that was preventing each GPU from working together properly it would be unlikely to cause frame rates to be acceptable one minute and drop like a stone the next.

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Do not meddle in the affairs of archers, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Post Count: +8510 Troll Hunter

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